


1100001 1101001

by Utari



Category: Rockman X | Mega Man X
Genre: Devotion, Existential Crisis, Fluff, M/M, Romance, Survivor Guilt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-23
Updated: 2016-04-23
Packaged: 2018-06-03 23:31:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,461
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6631537
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Utari/pseuds/Utari
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Set during Mega Man X2.  X fights to recover Zero's parts from the X hunters, and questions his own existence and motivations for continuing to fight for the humans in the war.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1100001 1101001

A large explosion temporarily overpowered his broad-range sensor. A few microseconds later he was surveying the damage he'd caused. The broken body of Serges lay in front of him, its power output rapidly declining.

"You really are beyond all expectation", he said. "Sigma is right to fear you."

' _Sigma! But he was dead, wasn't he_?'

"Is he behind this!?", X demanded an answer.

Serges only smiled. He raised his hand and X detected an energy surge. He readied his X-buster but the surge leveled off. It was nowhere near powerful enough to cause him any harm. The pattern became more coherent and he recognized the tell-tale signature of a teleportation device.

An object warped in. It was Zero's head. Feeling angry at being taunted and used, X was about to finish him off when he spoke again.

"You win X. As promised, here is the last part."

X stepped forward and picked up what anyone else would've considered scrap. Dr. Cain, however, was convinced that he could rebuild him. Zero's control chip was undamaged and repairing his body was only a matter of time. His legs and torso had been relatively undamaged considering how they'd looked on the outside. X sincerely hoped that his head would be in as good condition as well.

The power signature in front of him began to fluctuate randomly; Serges didn't have much time.

"Goodbye X", he said with a smile on his face.

Knowing the level of energy released by an explosion of that size, X activated his emergency acceleration system and dashed backwards while simultaneously activating his teleportation device. X may have been able to tolerate an explosion of that magnitude without damage; Zero too, but his head by itself would've been much more fragile. X was not willing to take any risks considering that now Zero could be reactivated.

He arrived in Dr. Cain's laboratory, where he was working on Zero's body. It looked almost new. It was such a change from what it'd looked like when he'd brought it in in pieces. X set the head down on a diagnostic pedestal. He wasn't in much of a mood to talk, but he had to know if Zero could be repaired.

"Well?" he asked Dr. Cain.

"His body is fine. Only a few minor things left before he's in better shape than before."

X breathed a quiet sigh of relief.

"And his head?"

Dr. Cain had already activated the diagnostic console and was studying the monitor in front of him. X appeared to wait patiently, but on the inside he was going mad with anticipation.

After what had seemed like an eternity, Dr. Cain spoke.

"There's more damage to his head than the other parts, but I can repair it."

X had tensed up at the first part of the sentence. When the second part registered, he gave an audible cry of relief.

"How long?"

"I'll need several weeks to bring him to full functionality, but I can probably reactivate him in a matter of days."

Days. In mere days Zero would be alive again. All of this searching for his parts and fighting the X-hunters had suddenly seemed so much more worthwhile.

"X?" Dr. Cain asked, seeing that he had become distracted.

"I'm sorry. You were saying."

"He won't be at full functionality, and certainly won't be doing any fighting, but he'll be able to walk around under his own power. You know that Zero can sometimes take risks though. I don't suppose you could be convinced to allow me to completely restore him before I reactivate him, could you?"

X simply stared at Dr. Cain, trying to decide if this was a joke, a sincere request, or something in between.

"That's what I thought", Dr. Cain said smiling. "Get some rest now. There's nothing you can do to help me now."

X opened his mouth to protest but Dr. Cain spoke before he could utter any sound.

"If you want Zero back as soon as possible, then I'll need to work quietly and without distraction. You've also been using a lot of energy lately. Unless you want to be recharged by one of my machines I suggest you let your accumulative energy generator do it for you."

"Alright", X agreed. He hated doing anything so robotic as charging his power cells via a cable. He could go to sleep, or what a roboticist would call a "reduced power mode" and his AEG would restore him in much the same way a human body would restore itself during sleep.

He picked up Zero's head and stared at it for a moment. He almost looked like he was in pain. How could he be though? His control chip wasn't even in his head, let alone active. Still... X softly stroked his cheek in a vain attempt to comfort him.

"You'll be alright", he spoke to it, "In a few days you'll be up and around. In a few weeks, you'll be good as new."

He ran his fingers through his long pony-tail. It was dirty, and tangled in some places, but at least it had survived the blast that had destroyed his body. Zero would've been upset if he'd woken up without it.

He carefully set the head back down on the pedestal with both hands and nodded to Dr. Cain before taking his leave. He walked down the long corridor to his room and sat in front of his computer station.

When Zero had been lost, he'd spent a lot of time here studying his own blueprints trying to understand everything. Why he was created, why the reploids were at war, why he hurt so much every time he thought of Zero.

He felt no closer to understanding anything. He'd gone to Dr. Cain after spending a lot of time trying to find out a way to make himself stop hurting. He'd suggested that Dr. Cain deactivate his Eros trilobe so that he would stop feeling emotions entirely. As much as he wanted to be human, as much as he already felt he _was_ human on the inside, the pain was unbearable.

Dr. Cain had explained that it was simply not possible. Dr. Light had designed the Logos, Ethos, and Eros trilobes to function in an interdependent way. The deactivation of one would've shut down the entire system and likely been fatal as the two remaining lobes struggled in vain to compensate for an unrecoverable error.

Dr. Cain suggested to X that feelings of loss and the desire to understand one's existence are very human and that to remove them would be to remove a part of his humanity. Still, X had insisted that there must be a way to remove his suffering. Anything! Anything that would've made life bearable, but Dr. Light was a genius among geniuses.

Dr. Cain confided that he fundamentally didn't understand X or Zero's programming. The other reploids he could, but X and Zero's Gestalt cores were beyond his comprehension. By all definitions they shouldn't even work at all. Dr. Light had no doubt named them thusly in a tacit nod to such.

The core was self-modifying, self-healing, self-learning, and self-protective. The only thing he'd ever seen that was even remotely similar to it was the neural net of the human brain.

X sighed. Maybe this was why he'd sided with the humans. He'd always felt like one. He chortled and smiled softly. Even when he'd first been activated by Dr. Cain he'd insisted he was a human. That his pod had to have been a stasis chamber and not a diagnostic chamber. 

It wasn't until Dr. Cain had convinced him to allow him to open up his X-buster that he'd been forced to acknowledge that he was, in fact, a reploid. Although at first he thought that maybe it was only an artificial limb.

Eventually, he'd accepted the fact that he wasn't human. It had been difficult. Then he met Zero. Zero was the only other reploid like himself. A reploid with the same fundamentally human core, with free-will and emotions. The other reploids were copied from their designs, but after Dr. Light's death, some things couldn't be replicated perfectly; they were the only two like each other.

The war had started not long after X had been activated. He never even considered any other possibility than siding with the humans over the maverick reploids. After Zero's death, he'd wondered why he'd made the decision. Was he programmed that way? No. His Logos engine had calculated that his odds of winning and attaining nigh absolute power and dominance over humanity was almost certain had he sided with the mavericks, but he knew somehow that that would be wrong.

An internal alarm warning him that his power levels had dropped another 5% broke his thoughts and X went over to his bed to "sleep" after first removing his helmet. Removing his helmet was always a bit disorienting. The broad range sensor in it gave him such a greater sense of his surroundings, its removal he imagined would feel to a human like donning a dark pair of goggles with only pinpoints in the center with which to see along with a pair of sturdy earmuffs.

He could've slept standing up, but that felt too robotic. He liked doing human things even when they added extra time to his day. In this case it was only a few seconds to lie down and stand up but calculating that over his likely lifespan was not an insignificant number.

Lying down, he entered a low-power mode which he called "sleep". It wasn't technically sleep in the way that humans experience it in that he was still partially conscious. He didn't exactly dream the way humans did, but when he'd described how he felt subjectively, Dr. Cain said it was very similar to how humans experience sleep.

Technically, his active memory would be periodically shut down and flushed in cycles, where his consciousness would then jump to the next available block of RAM. He was not capable of processing things with his full power and so images and solutions to problems were incomplete or given multiple likely possibilities when they were statistical calculations. The perception of this experience was very similar to how humans dream, at least according to Dr. Cain.

He decided to "sleep" and recharge until his power cells were fully charged. He'd calculated that it would take several days to do so. Hopefully Zero would have been repaired by then. His dreams were filled with thoughts of Zero. Of leaving him behind. He hadn't wanted to, but he knew that Sigma had to be stopped. Zero knew it too.

He regretted leaving Zero behind more than anything. He'd already died in Sigma's fortress, but still... he left his body behind to be taken and used by the X-hunters. When they'd contacted him he vowed to get Zero's parts back at any cost.

He heard a chime on his door and he began reactivating his systems. It would take a few minutes for everything to function at 100% capacity but it took only seconds to go from minimal power to 85% functionality. Dr. Light had no doubt designed this to mimic humanities' response to waking.

"Enter", he spoke loudly.

The door opened. It was Dr. Cain.

"I'm ready to reactivate Zero", he said, "I thought you'd want to be there when I did."

Had the time passed that quickly? His internal chronometer and the ones in the room were in agreement. Several days had passed already.

X nodded and walked forward after grabbing and donning his helmet, with Dr. Cain turning and leading the way back to the lab.

Zero was lying on the same table as before, only now he was whole. His head had been reattached, polished, and repaired so that, on the outside at least, Zero looked healthy and undamaged.

X walked over to the table and stood there. Dr. Cain wheeled over a small cart that had Zero's control chip contained inside a protective glass cylinder atop it. He carefully removed it with gloved hands deftly manipulating a pair of fine forceps and inserted it into a slot in the back of Zero's skull.

He closed the piece of skull that had swung to the side on its hinges and walked over to his main console.

"You should tell him", he said.

X was silent.

"You will suffer unless and until you do so. You're too human to do otherwise", he added.

"Activate him", X said coldly.

Turning back to his console, Dr. Cain began typing something and X recognized the tell-tale _clack_ of the return key being pressed and prepared himself as best he could for what was now going to happen.

He stepped forward and held Zero's hand as he saw his power levels start to rise.

'Come on Zero', he was chanting in his head.

Suddenly, Zero took a deep breath and opened his eyes. X squeezed his hand spoke softly.

"Don't try to move yet. You're safe in Dr. Cain's lab. You've been inactive for six months and Dr. Cain hasn't finished repairing all of your damage. You should be able to walk around though, but give yourself some time for your gyros to recalibrate themselves."

Zero nodded in understanding.

Dr. Cain walked over, having finished running some diagnostics that could only be run while Zero was active. Zero turned to him and asked, "How bad is it?"

"Not that bad", he responded. "Your power cells are leaking energy from being inactive for so long and will have to be replaced. The rest of your systems primarily need only minor maintenance. I'll replace your power cells first thing tomorrow morning. In the meantime, they'll last indefinitely so long as you don't use your Z-buster."

"I had Dr. Cain replace your beam sabre", X interjected. "It was too powerful for my systems anyway. Dr. Cain was getting mad having to replace so many blown fuses and burnt wiring", he said with the hint of a smile on his face.

"Well, it's been a long couple of days for an old man like myself", Dr. Cain said. "I'll think I'll turn in for the night. I imagine you two have a lot of catching up to do."

He nodded to X, and patted Zero on the shoulder in way that said, 'Welcome back', before shuffling out of the room.

Zero spoke, "Six months? What's happened?"

"Sigma's been destroyed . The war with the mavericks is almost over. There are a few strongholds left but they're down to their last. I've been fighting to retrieve your parts as of late though", X looked away. He felt ashamed saying what he was about to say.

"After I defeated Sigma, his base self-destructed", he paused to collect his thoughts and continued haltingly. "I tried to search for you, but I couldn't find anything... I took your control chip right after you...", he couldn't bring himself to say the word 'died' so he trailed off. "By the time I went back for your body there was nothing but rubble left of the base. I tried to search through it but I couldn't find anything."

He continued, "A few weeks ago a group calling themselves the 'X-hunters' claimed to have your parts", his voice had become more determined by this point, more angry. "They said if I wanted them I would have to defeat them, so I did. Dr. Cain was convinced that he could reactivate you if he had your body, but I couldn't leave it in their hands regardless." He paused before finishing, "That's about everything."

Zero smiled softly, "You really have surpassed me haven't you?"

X turned to him and Zero continued, "I suppose there's no point in telling you that you took an unnecessary risk. I probably would've done the same."

He sat up slowly, with X helping him up.

"How do you feel?", X asked.

"Alright, I suppose. Dr. Cain's right though, I'm not in any shape to fight. If you've managed to carry things this far though, I doubt I'll be needed."

"It wasn't easy doing things without you. If it weren't for your beam sabre I wouldn't have accomplished nearly as much as I did. As far as I'm concerned, that means you helped", he gently squeezed his hand before adding, "And that you're needed."

They sat in silence for a moment.

"Zero..."

"X", he countered, "What're you going to say?", he spoke in a way that indicated that he already knew. "Is it worth it with the war going on? What if I die again, this time beyond repair, will you be able to handle a loss like that if we're even closer?"

X shook his head, "It'll be a bigger loss if I know I'm this close to you and never did anything, never told you how I feel. Zero, I love you more than anything in this world. You're the reason I fight for a better world. As far as I'm concerned, that world may or may not come, but we can still be together, we can still be happy _now_."

Zero sat in silence. X was softly touching and squeezing his hand. He knew Zero loved him, Zero knew he loved him, and Zero knew that X knew that he loved him. There wasn't much to do except wait and see if he was ready, and willing, to acknowledge that fact and to try to make something wonderful from it.

"X..." Zero finally spoke, "For once I don't know what to do, my core can't handle an equation with that many variables, but I want to trust you, and I want to trust _in_ you." He turned to look him in the eye, "I love you too, let's hope that everything will be okay."

"Everything _will_ be okay", X reassured him. He then embraced him and held him close, Zero was only able to weakly return the embrace, many of his fine, delicate parts were still in need of repair. Eventually, after holding him long enough, X released him. "You probably want to rest now", he said.

"Yeah, that would be nice", Zero replied.

"Need any help?"

"I think I'm okay."

With that, he gingerly swung his legs over the side of the table and stood. He was a little wobbly, but X didn't offer any assistance. He knew Zero still had his pride. Still, he made sure to stay near enough to catch him should he stumble or fall.

He took a few steps and stumbled slightly. X moved forward but did nothing further, as Zero was able to recover. After a few more steps though, he stumbled and fell into X.

"Maybe a little help wouldn't hurt", he said with a smile on his face.

X nodded and placed an arm around his waist as Zero put an arm around X's shoulders. They made their way to Zero's room and X sat him down on his bed.

X placed his hands on either side of Zero's helmet and removed it after a few clicks told him Zero had released the locks which fastened it to his head. Some strands of his hair fell onto his face and Zero brushed them aside. Dr. Cain had obviously washed it as part of his reassemblage.

Zero never made a tacit acknowledgement of it, but his hair was very important to him. Anyone with calf-length hair would obviously feel that way. Dr. Cain no doubt seen that too and made sure it looked nice before reactivating him. His servos and gyros could wait.

X removed his own helmet after mentally preparing himself for the disorientation that accompanied deactivation of his broad range sensor and sat next to Zero. He held his hand softly for a moment before moving behind him and embracing him. Zero sighed softly as X brushed his fingers over his face and he turned his head into them.

X gently placed his hands on Zero's shoulder guards and waited. A few more clicks were heard and he removed Zero's body armor, standing again to set it to the side. He removed his own and sat next to Zero again for a moment before gently pulling him into a reclining position against his chest.

He laid themselves down on the bed and Zero turned so they were lying side-by-side facing each other. X stared into Zero's eyes as he softly stroked the side of his face. The was no need to speak, no need for words. He gave him a soft kiss on the forehead and stared into his eyes again. Zero then moved forward and they kissed each other tenderly before falling asleep in each other's arms.

**Author's Note:**

> So, what did you think? This was one of my earlier works, and I'd like to think that my writing has improved somewhat over this, so I was hesitant to post this for awhile but I think it stands well enough on its own and doesn't have any major flaws in the writing or the story. Besides, I kind of want to have one of my earlier fics on here, since it shows that my writing has (hopefully!) improved over time.
> 
> It's a bit short, but I wrote it as a challenge among friends and ended up writing the longest fic (by far!) of their friendly competition. ^_^
> 
> BTW, the two binary numbers that make up the fic's title are 97 and 105 in decimal notation. In the ASCII character set, those correspond to the letters 'a' and 'i' respectively. "AI" stands for "Artificial Intelligence", and "ai" is also the Japanese word for love! I love putting in little hidden meanings like that! ^_^


End file.
